Today's business environment has become increasingly dependent on electronic commerce or “e-commerce” applications for their day to day operations. E-commerce applications typically define such enterprise-wide functions as supply chain management purchasing, sales, finance, manufacturing, enterprise resource planning, and data processing. An e-commerce application is typically designed to operate or run on a dedicated computer server or group of servers known collectively as an e-commerce or transaction server. Such server products include the TUXEDO™ product from BEA Systems, Inc., San Jose, Calif.; Weblogic Server™, also from BEA Systems; Commerce Server™ from Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Wash.; and both Avila™ and CRM™ from IBM Corporation, Armonk, N.Y.
The key requirements for such servers are that they be proven, reliable, and scalable so as to meet the needs of a growing organization. Some products are also designed with flexibility in mind. Particularly, TUXEDO is geared towards providing a powerful and flexible end-to-end e-commerce solution that can be used to connect and empower all users, while integrating all of a corporations corporate data.
One of the primary disadvantage of such e-commerce or transaction servers is that they tend to be very large applications in and of themselves. The typical e-commerce server ships as a server application that must be compiled to form an engine or kernel through which client applications may then communicate. Once compiled, very little can be added or modified to the server application, and hence to the system, without requiring a reconfiguration of this kernel.
FIG. 1 shows a traditional kernel compilation process as it applies to an e-commerce application. As shown therein, the typical e-commerce server may be originally shipped with little or no “personality”. As used herein the term “personality” is used to refer to a particular application front end with which user (client) applications will interact, and include such personalities as AMS, Jolt and TUXEDO. Personalities communicate with the outside world (i.e., the client applications) via a variety of programming concepts that are hereinafter referred to as “attitudes”. Attitudes may include for example, Java, C, C++, Cobol, and OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). Similarly the e-commerce server may ship with little or no extensions, add-on applications that are used by the e-commerce server but are not directly programmed as a client application, and in some cases may not even interact with the outside world. Extensions can be considered as useful utility functions that are used to augment the server's standard features.
Traditionally, in order to add personalities or extensions the server kernel must be re-configured and recompiled at each step. This necessitates server downtime and greatly increases the risks that errors will be introduced either during the recompile process or during the attempt to get the server running again in the shortest possible time. As shown in FIG. 1, switching to a TUXEDO personality, adding a connection module extension, and then adding a security module extension, may take as many as three server downtimes and kernel recompiles. Such compile problems are also encountered when adding routine server application updates and software patches. The traditional server architecture likewise does not lend itself to reuse of Module code when the server kernel is itself replaced. Much time and cost is spent re-writing code for new releases of a server product that does much the same as the last version of the code. Customers who develop custom code to run with or within their server product find their code unusable with server releases of the server product. The overall result is one of redundant coding, expense and wasted time.